Technology, Smartphones, Games

Opera 12 browser gets its first update in 2 years

Opera 12 browser, the last version of the popular browser, which used the Presto Engine, has been updated.

The developers hadn't updated the app for two years (from v 12.27), since April 2014.

Opera ditched its own Presto engine in 2013, in favour of the Webkit engine used by Google Chromium, but soon the Mountain View company abandoned it and upgraded to the Blink engine, and Opera followed it. But this didn't prove to be a popular move, as fans split into several groups, with some sticking to the new Opera, some switching to other browsers, while the loyal users stuck to Opera 12 and refused to switch.

This even led to the creation of an entirely new browser called Vivaldi. It was created by John von Tetzchner, the co-founder of Opera, who slammed his former company, for abandoning Opera's original features, such as mail (though Vivaldi is also based on Chromium and is yet to debut its Mail app).

Now, Opera 12 has been updated to 12.18, to support ECC (Elliptic Curve Cryptography) cipher suites for secure connections, and also enable support for Transport Layer Security (TLS), while deprecating RC4 (Rivest Cipher 4). You can still enable RC4 if needed.

The move follows other browser makers like Microsoft Edge/IE, Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox who also announced the end of RC4 support in 2015. Opera Mail was also updated to fix a security issue, which could have led to a potential remote code execution by attackers.

On a side note, while the Windows versions of Opera 12 and Opera Mail will be updated (hopefully), the apps for other platforms will no longer be updated, citiing low number of users. The browser maker, is also suggesting Windows XP users to upgrade to a newer version of Windows, and then use the latest version of Opera (based on Chromium).